There's a lot about this game that I appreciate. For one it has a nice feel and setting. The game basically feels like a tabletop dungeon crawl. The music is perfect. And there is just enough customization with gear/slots and stuff to make it interesting. Character Stats are sensible and intuitive and quick to pick up

In short this went in a much better direction than those Space Hulk games did. It doesn't get overly involved like Mechanicus or let you spec.
The game features a nice 'journal' which is a cliff's note Source Book, Rule Book, and Beastiary. Every new detail uncovered unlocks a page for you to read (or ignore)

The meat of the game itself is a bit odd. You have four party members and as you crawl through one dungeon to the next you visit towns in between crawls, restocking supplies, buying better gear and talking to the mayor for a quest or two, then its off to the tunnels & trolls you go!

Initially this is not unusual, what happen though is as you gain levels you pay for the trainer in town to unlock that level. when you do this you unlock harder dungeons. The game is a balance between gearing up and levelling and i didnt know this, opting instead for fast skill gains at the paltry sum of 250, 500, 1000, 2000 gold to get to level 4. i then became overwhelmed and learned the darker side of this game: death

Basically when you lose a member it's like Gloomhaven and you thereafter tend to just get wiped quite quickly. It's possible to persevere and continue but the fact is its usually your healer/wizard who goes down first, which is key to keeping the rest of the party alive. This happens when you get ambushed from behind and your fighters cant get to the assailants because the tunnel i too tight. There are ways around this (some skills, and some items) but its always a pain. You can also just get unlucky and be met with ambush spawns one after another, rendering your wiz altogether useless.

Each warrior has slots tied to item rarity. So an upgrade from green gear to blue gear will free a green slot but remove the availability of a blue (something trickier as the game progresses)

in any case death in this game isnt so bad. even if your undergeared fighters are sent unwittingly by the player to a grief-giving dungeon they have the added bonus of making gold for every kill, even though they lose the XP they gain. This means you can indefinitely grind for gold and remain locked at lower levels. In fact, the max level dungeonsin the base game is 5 which isnt that hard to get too.

Getting the hang of this took more time than what I felt it should. I was grinding lower level dungeons and getting too many gear upgrades rather than just going for bigger ones. In hindsight I could have completed this game faster than I did and hit 'the wall'

Thus we come to why I rate this game two stars. The game is 15 on steam but the DLC is 20.. and to complete this game (story mode) you have to visit two other lands which guess what, require the DLC. No closure whatsoever for the 'base' campaign.

IMO, that's just unethical. A 'paywall' like that is the sort of thing one expects with free to play games, or MMOS. but this is a simple game. It could easily have just ended where it did, with no furrther extra classes to be available, lands to unluck or unique items to tip the balance in my favor. It is a stretch to say that the full thing would even be worth the price of the base alone. This is one of those games where the base game would satisfy most if not all, but they did this to encourage you to get it. for shame.

In the end this was a repetitive game, I am curious to check out the sequel someday but the design of this bummed me so bad that I probably never will even seek it out. A shame as I was finally getting into it and starting to think it was a decent game.